![]() This intimate moment has a significant audience: a whole crowd of people has followed Mary, assuming she is going to Lazarus’s tomb to publicly mourn. Like Martha, Mary laments to Jesus, “If you had been here…” but she does so at his feet, having knelt in reverence and acceptance of who Jesus is to her: a posture of one anchored to the love of Christ. He allows Mary to come to him, as she is ready, with her grief. Martha goes to Mary privately to tell her that Jesus is waiting for her. (Preaching sidenote: by doing so, her proclamation brings together our two previous lectionary texts!) When Jesus tells her that he himself is the Resurrection and the Life and asks her about the kind of belief she has, she appears to be just as honest as she was in her grief: she is sure that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. I think that Martha’s next two statements show that her faith continues to be strong, even though Jesus was not there when they needed him: “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” And, “I know that will rise again…”Įven though Martha has walked through the valley of the shadow of death, she does not doubt the goodness of the Lord, or the love of Jesus Christ. When she meets him as he is headed to Bethany, she freely laments and shares her heart with Jesus: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” She believes that Jesus is powerful, and she trusts that power as well as the fact that Jesus loves them. Martha also seems to be anchored in the knowledge of Jesus’s love for them. What we see is that even though he knows how this story ends, Jesus feels and expresses genuine love for his friends, joining them in their suffering. Jesus knows what is to come in this saga (the glorifying miracle), and he loves them. ![]() God’s glory does not cancel out God’s love. ![]() It was not a lack of love that kept him away, nor was it a lack of love that led to Lazarus dying. No matter what happens next, we can come back to the knowledge that Jesus loves them. ![]() “Though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus…” is not so much a narrative pivot point as it is an anchor point. Jesus tells his disciples that this will all end in the glory of God, so even though he loved them, he did not immediately go to the Bethany. Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus to let him know that their shared beloved, Lazarus, is ill to the point of death. The word “love” is used only three times to describe Jesus’s feelings for the siblings, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, but it permeates the entire narrative. ![]()
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